Today is the North American release day for Dragon Age II, BioWare's role-playing sequel, which will be available in Europe on Friday. In addition to the retail edition, the game is also available online from the EA Store, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Impulse, and Steam. Also, the BioWare Social Network offers a high-resolution texture pack for the game. Here's word on the 1.08 GB patch: "Using high-resolution textures requires a graphics card with at least 1024MB video memory. Most of the benefits from the Hi-resolution textures will only be seen if you are able to run the game in DirectX 11." For those interested in sampling the game, a playable demo was released last month.

And people wonder why demo's aren't released. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

There are a lot of things they could have done to improve the demo. First and foremost, if they hadn't locked the difficulty to Normal, nobody would have complained about the combat being too easy. They shouldn't have locked the inventory either. Or most of the game options. They should have also made sure that the DX10 and 11 modes actually worked correctly.

Rest assured, playing the game on Nightmare difficulty makes a huge difference. I still don't like the limited tactical camera or the other changes they've made but the combat is still challenging and tactical on the highest difficulty setting.

And the game looks pretty good on the highest detail settings + hi-res texture pack. A lot better than the demo, for sure.